Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Artificial Radio Hour with Rev. Dr. Dr. Phill Part 33

Some mellow, electronic stuff this week. A few fun synchronicities, too.

Symphony Of Science is composer John D. Boswell creating music using Carl Sagan's Cosmos and other bits of science education as vocals. It's great!

Carl's metaphor of people leaving Earth as "venturing into an ocean" is an unexpectedly apt match with a script from the podcast Flash Forward that was written by a neural net artificial intelligence. (More info at that link.) Oceans, and Mars, but also... "behandings"? It's weird, even before I edited it and added echo & reverb, etc. The Flash Forward episode also included excerpts from an AI-written podcast and a sci-fi short, which you can find below.

Numbers. (it turns out there are other bands with similar names)

Numbers, Mogwai, and Tortoise are all kind of in the genre of "post-rock", which is... i dunno, pretty mellow? Not a lot of drums, but lots of drones.

It's the picture on his Wikipedia page, I didn't do anything to it.

Aphex Twin, aka Richerd D. James, is mostly a dance/techno guy, but his debut album "Selected Ambient Works 85–92" put him in a mellow category. The track here is from the follow-up "Selected Ambient Works Volume II", which was pretty much completely beatless.

Speaking of ambient, here's another Judee Sill track recorded by holding a mic up to the speaker of a TV broadcasting her 1972 BBC concert. I hope you didn't really need to understand the lyrics...

Here's the full video of the A.I.-written Idea Channel episode. Pretty crazy.

I had to include a pic of Wendy Mae's Car Horn Organ even it's not heard.

I'll bet you can figure out what Wendy Mae Chambers track Brooklyn Bridge is about just by listening to it.

Sadly there was never a Ruby cartoon. It would've been great.

Finally, that's it for the first Ruby serial. Let me know if you want more Ruby or something else! Jack Flanders? Hitch-Hiker's Gude? I'm also thinking of some audiobook excerpts.

Ruby, Too? It's... different.

That's it for this week. Please leave comments in all the usual places, or just respond to this email!